Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  “Father Alexis?” asked Athina, alarmed.

  “Let me clean your wounds.” He lifted the hem of his robe to dab at the caked blood.

  “What are you doing?”

  The priest tilted his head to look into her face.

  In his dark eyes, she saw a mirror of her own sorrow, and slowly knelt beside him. “You need love, too, don’t you?”

  He barely nodded.

  Sympathetic tears welled up in Athina’s eyes as she pulled him to her bare shoulder.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  A HEADWIND BUFFETED TAKIS’S CAR as he wound down a narrow valley with the speed of a local’s familiarity. “Do you swim every day?” he asked Nick.

  “I try to.”

  “That’s why you’re in good shape.”

  “You are, too.”

  “Not from exercise. I don’t get enough of it here. I just don’t eat.”

  “How can you work in a restaurant and not eat?”

  “Technically, it’s a bar not a restaurant, and I’m never really sure if my sister has recycled something or not. Things left on one plate get reheated and dumped onto the next one. Round two on soup? I’m not that hungry.”

  “She really does that?”

  “She’s a whore, too. She uses that kiss-the-brandy-glass trick on every man she wants to fuck. She thinks it’s sexy.”

  “For the right guy, it would be.”

  “I’m sure some guys wake up in the morning wondering where that ring around the rosy came from.”

  “I wouldn’t be one of those guys.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Takis downshifted, and used it as an excuse to touch Nick’s knee.

  “You never said why you moved to Australia.”

  “I put a gun to Greece and shot a hole through the globe, and that’s where it came out.”

  “I take it you wanted to get away.”

  “I wish the earth were bigger. I hate this fucking place.”

  “Why’d you come back?”

  “Omar—he was my sister’s husband—didn’t deserve what happened to him. Neither did my sister. And the short answer to your next question: he committed suicide.” Takis pulled off the road and cut the engine. “We’re here.”

  Nick looked out. Black hills rose to one side, an inky sea stretched into oblivion on the other. Moonlit whitecaps rolled onto shore. “We are?”

  Takis got out and stood in the open door. “We should undress here.”

  “Here?”

  “Otherwise, everything will get wet.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see. Hurry, because it’s bloody cold!” Takis opened a couple of buttons and pulled his shirt over his head. His chest was more muscular than Nick had expected, with a patch of black hair between his nipples.

  Nick, self-conscious of his scarred back, reluctantly unbuttoned his shirt. When he could, he avoided undressing in front of others. Of course he’d had no choice about stripping down in Army showers— though his scars sometimes earned him undeserved admiration when mistaken for war wounds. He was especially self-conscious when it came to sex, and that was where, hopefully, the night was headed.

  Takis tossed his shoes and socks back into the car, worked off his pants, and waited for Nick to catch up. When both were down to their underwear, he said, “Take off everything, unless you want to ride home with wet balls.”

  They stripped, and Nick followed the naked young man onto the beach. Moonlight fell across his shoulders and showed his buttocks flexing as he picked his way across the pebbles. In a short distance, they came to the whitewashed walls of an ancient hammam. Oblong, it had a vaulted roof and a rounded snout that jutted into the sea. The wind-driven waves crashed against it. Takis planted his hands on its side and stepped into the cold rough water.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just follow me!”

  Immediately drenched, and quickly waist deep in the churning sea, they had to struggle to stay upright. The water knocked them one way while the undertow dragged them the other. When they’d worked their way around to the other side, they crawled onto a stone landing and collapsed, wracked with shivers, elbows tucked under them for warmth. “You call this a hot bath?” Nick finally managed to say.

  Takis blindly dropped a hand on his back. “Just wait.”

  Nick shook his hand off, and Takis, wondering why, saw his scars. “You were in a fire?” he asked.

  “I should’ve warned you. It’s why I usually don’t get naked on a first date.”

  “Your scars won’t bother me.”

  “They bother me.”

  “Maybe a hot bath will change that.” Takis stood up. The hammam’s short door was unlocked and he stooped to step through it.

  Nick followed him.

  Warm dank air instantly enveloped them.

  “Don’t move until your eyes adjust to the light,” Takis cautioned as he closed the door behind him. “You don’t want to fall into it.”

  “Fall into what?”

  Moonlight streaming through round vents in the curved ceiling revealed the black pool. Rectangular, it stretched the length of the hammam, and the steam rising from it smelled faintly of minerals.

  “I promised you a hot bath,” Takis said. “I also promise, you’ll never take a hotter one.”

  He sat on its edge, stuck his legs out and bobbed his heels in the water.

  Nick sat next to him. The flagstones felt cool on his bare skin. He copied Takis and stuck out his legs, but the first time he bobbed his heels, he retracted them. “Holy shit that’s hot!”

  Takis laughed.

  “You actually put your body into this?”

  “The trick is to go in slowly. Very, very slowly.”

  “The trick is not to go in at all!”

  “That’s the problem with very very slowly.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll end up not going in at all.”

  In the next instant, Takis slipped into the pool up to his neck. His chest heaved from the shock.

  “How did you do that?”

  “You have to come in, too.”

  “No way.”

  “If you want to have sex tonight, you will.”

  “What? Are you blackmailing me?”

  “I won’t sleep with a man who hasn’t had a bath.”

  “I have a shower back in my room.”

  “We’re not going back to your room.”

  Again Nick tested a heel in the water. “I can’t believe this doesn’t melt flesh.”

  Without warning, Takis grabbed his foot and pulled him into the water.

  Nick flailed, and yelped.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No! I feel like the meat in cannibal soup!”

  “Sit very still. The more you move, the hotter it feels.”

  “I’m surprised I can move at all. You’re used to this?”

  “I know what to expect.”

  “And you’re crazy enough to still do it?”

  “Afterwards, you feel great.”

  “Afterwards, I’m not sure I’ll be able to feel anything.”

  “Run your fingers over the water. You’ll see how it feels even hotter.”

  “Who wants it hotter?”

  “Just try it.”

  Nick did, and it did feel hotter, but he was getting used to it.

  Takis, too, drifted his fingers on the water’s surface, and their hands touched. Fingers entwined, they pulled each other into a tentative kiss that became a long one. With lips trying to stay together, they crawled onto the cool flagstones, hands venturing where their mouths would later explore.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LYDIA STOOD OUTSIDE HER DAUGHTER’S door staring at the knob. Athina was forever setting new boundaries, frequently revoking rights her mother thought inalienable, the right to bedroom entry being among them. When she’d started to lock her door, Lydia worried. That had to mean some serious things were happening to her baby girl. Gradually she
learned the reasons had never been more than teenage pangs: broken allegiances, broken promises, broken hearts—nothing that growing up wouldn’t heal.

  This time, Lydia sensed, was profoundly different.

  The night before, she woke up when Athina returned. It was the constipated click of the latch that alerted her that something was wrong. Her daughter was sneaking in. She switched off the telly to ask, “Where have you been?”

  “It’s so cold, I thought Ridi might need a blanket, too. Is that a crime?”

  Lydia hadn’t articulated a rule against delivering a blanket to Ridi on a cold night, so she had to agree. “No, it’s not a crime. I do like to know where you are in case something happens.”

  “Nothing ever happens. Besides, how would you know if something did happen? You were asleep. May I go back to bed, please?”

  “Did Ridi appreciate the blanket?”

  “I don’t know. He was asleep.”

  “He’ll appreciate it when he wakes up.”

  The girl didn’t respond and disappeared into her room.

  Lydia went to the loo, and by the time she emerged, the light under her daughter’s door was already out. She went to bed, snuggling into her husband’s warmth, and murmuring good night as she always did before rolling onto the cool sheets on her side. It never bothered Lefteris that he had to wake up before dawn; he slept well, snoring heavily, and then with a loud snort waking himself precisely on time. He had fish to catch; and some mornings, he caught Lydia, too, before he went to sea. It was when he was his liveliest. But not that morning. She’d slept fitfully, not truly falling asleep until he left—only to awaken with a start. Her subconscious screamed at her: Your movie on TV was over before your daughter returned. How long was she really gone?

  Something had happened.

  Lydia made a pot of tea and carried a cup outside. Stavros was heaving a tub of his night’s catch onto the wharf, but she was in no mood to think about him or any man that morning. She worried what the man who’d slept in her restaurant downstairs might have done to her daughter. She’d been secretive, and Lydia wanted to know why.

  She left the balcony, and went down the hall and tapped on her daughter’s door. She didn’t wait for the predictable “Go away I’m sleeping!” and grasped the doorknob to turn it.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  WHEN THE DEED WAS DONE, Father Alexis had rolled onto his knees to pray to the Virgin—the icon, not Athina, who no longer was one. He grossed her out when he pulled out his Sporell and smeared himself with it under his robe. It was weird, and a disappointing denouement to her long-anticipated first going-all-the-way experience, despite going almost all the way with a lot of horny guys who, as a pack, couldn’t think about anything other than doing it. Until the priest mounted her in his hirsute robe, she had never fully grasped the sex act’s essential primevalness: its groping and painful intrusion, and the urgent coupling. Athina’s fantasy had always been a totally naked boy in bed, their silky flesh entangled for unhurried hours in a candlelit room where, in a long mirror, she would glimpse his bum in the starched white sheets during repeated bouts of lovemaking.

  Except for the candles flickering in the church, her first time had been nothing like that. No naked bodies. No unhurried hours. No kissing, or nuzzling, or suggestion of a second go; and the first time, shouldn’t there be at least a second go? She couldn’t believe the injustice of it. She couldn’t believe what had happened in an insane moment. Of course, if it hadn’t been for Ridi’s own insane moment, she’d still be intact; but she knew, too, that she couldn’t blame the young waiter. She had fended off enough other guys more earnest than the priest. Her own primeval urges had driven her to help the beastly Father consummate his awkward embrace. If she thought she was hurting Ridi by doing it, she had awakened from her sorry night realizing she had hurt herself far more.

  She heard her mother’s faint tapping on her door.

  Shit! Had she locked it? Athina jumped out of bed to punch in the lock. She didn’t want her mother’s questions when she had so many herself.

  She reached it too late.

  The door swung open. “You’re not locking me out this time,” her mother said. “You snuck out last night.”

  “I didn’t sneak out. I took Ridi a blanket.”

  Lydia’s expression turned to stone.

  “What’s wrong?” the girl asked.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  She was. There was a trickle of dried blood on her leg. “I think it’s stopped,” she said, worried, appealing to her mother.

  “He raped you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes!” Athina cried, and fell into Lydia’s arms.

  Her daughter’s distress was loudest in the words she left unsaid. Nothing about tenderness; no satisfaction in the rite of passage; no pleasure in the pain. “We weren’t even naked!” she wailed. Lydia didn’t pry for more details. It was enough that her daughter had been forcibly taken, or forcibly enough that it left her sad and shaken. No doubt Athina had flirted and offered a coaxing kiss, but it hadn’t ended where the girl wanted. Had she actually said No!? It didn’t matter. She was still only a child, not eighteen for another week. Any self-respecting man would have restrained himself; but, she supposed, not a horny young one, especially when a beautiful girl suddenly visits him in the night.

  “He was like a horrible hairy animal!” the girl cried.

  “I’m calling the doctor.”

  “Please don’t! He didn’t hurt me. Not really. I mean, the blood is natural, isn’t it?”

  It was, Lydia reassured her, yet no girl should be describing her first lover as a horrible hairy animal! That was not natural.

  He had raped her.

  She handed Athina her teddy bear, which had fallen to the floor. “Take a shower and have some breakfast. You’ll feel better.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I won’t be long,” Lydia replied, and left the house.

  Around the front of the building, she paused, debating if she should go into the restaurant and visit the scene of the crime. What would be revealed? All that she would find would be her own sad heart over her daughter’s distress.

  “Pompano?” Stavros shouted at her from down the wharf. “They won’t be running much longer!”

  “Oxi symera,” she called back. Not today. “Lefteris is out fishing!”

  “Why? I’ve already caught his fish! Instead he should be trying to catch you this morning!”

  Lydia wasn’t in a smiling mood. She didn’t need a man flirting with her, certainly not the man with whom she’d had her one secret affair. It had been before she was married, but not by much; and it had been her first time, too. Sometimes she puzzled over why it had happened at all, but one thing was for sure, no woman would ever disparage Stavros as a horrible, hairy animal. She felt sorry for her daughter. Every girl dreamed romantically of her first lover, and she should: there is only one first time.

  Unknowingly, she followed the trail that Athina had taken into the village the night before. Apostolis had a part-time job at a restaurant, occasionally drove a taxi, and wore the village policeman’s badge when he wasn’t wearing the fire chief’s hat. He could be almost anywhere. Lydia decided to try to find him at home and knocked on his door.

  When he answered, she told him outright, “Athina has been raped.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  NICK ENTERED THE GATE. A stone wall, chest high and spotted with orange lichen, encircled the churchyard’s irregular shape. A corner jutted out to embrace the controversial bell tower. Was its repair a Church or village responsibility? Giving it a good look, Nick was glad it wasn’t his headache to maintain: an uneven stack of bricks so poorly laid that even glopped-on stucco couldn’t camouflage the bad job. Incongruously, perched atop it was an astounding bronze bell suspended in vaulted marble windows. Using the telephoto on his phone, Nick examined the crack that sprang from a window’s bottom corner and zigzagged down, he guessed a little over two feet. It wa
s an important load-bearing point and looked seriously compromised.

  Click!

  Midway along the fissure, he could see where a large chunk had fallen off; recently, it appeared, from the whiter cavity left behind in the weathered stucco.

  Click! Click!

  Other pit marks and chips straggled the crack, but many were freestanding, clearly not caused by movement or stress. They had been made by impact, most likely someone using a hammer. Nick was snapping more photos when he heard, “Boro se voidiso?” Can I help you?

  He turned to Father Alexis. “I hope you speak English.”

  “I don’t have much practice to use it.”

  “It has to be better than my Greek, which is only good enough to order food and talk about the weather.” Nick frequently downplayed how well he spoke Greek as a ploy to steer important conversations into English; it gave him more control of them, and he definitely wanted to have an important conversation with Father Alexis. He had come to the church intending to ask him about the arsonist case. Now he wanted to know why the man had manufactured a crisis over a bogus crack in the bell tower; or rather, what had likely started as a bogus crack, but now, because of the damage to it, appeared significant enough to matter.

  The priest smiled ingratiatingly. “That should suffice for this village, since most people talk only about the weather. But yes, I do speak English. It is necessary to reach the higher levels of—” He stopped, unable to recall a word.

  “Heaven?” Nick suggested.

  The priest shook his head. “Hierarchy,” he remembered.

  “Hierarchy?”

  “Yes, in the Church.”

  “Ah yes, I understand.” Nick turned his attention back to the bell tower. “A minute ago, you asked if you could help me. I don’t need help, but that tower sure does. I’ve seen minarets in better shape come crashing down.”

  “Minarets?”

  “In Afghanistan, and they were only holding up a loudspeaker, not a big bell. That thing must weigh a ton.”

  “Three tons,” the priest proudly informed him.